hey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one:
we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.
we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is–particularly with federation in mind–basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we’re being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).
an unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well. we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.
aside from/complementary to what’s mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:
- these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
- the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
- our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
- and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don’t care about what our instance stands for
as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:
There’s a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it’s not just that, there’s a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it’s really hard to trust and support who’s around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there’s more hostility around them. They’ll even shut themselves off when there’s fake nice behavior around. There’s a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it’s not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can’t even assess that for people who aren’t from our instance, so we’re walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn’t sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.
Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren’t open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.
and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it’s in effect. but we hope you can understand why we’re doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.
this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community’s owner, i should add–we just have differing interests here and that’s fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we’ll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.
thanks for using our site folks.
Thank you.
I know what it’s like to try to build up something good only to have trolls try to take it over. It’s nice to think that kindness and guidance can make everything shiny and happy, but the reality is that sometimes you just have to shut the door to bad actors and lock it behind them.
Some people have a need to try to ruin things for others. There’s no reason to give them a platform. Actions have consequences.
Yeah, I’m perfectly fine with this decision. And if I want to see content from and interact on those instances, I can (and have already) create accounts on those instances. No harm no foul.
Commenting sure. But until some instance agnostic subscription feed comes out it looks like there is no reddit alternative to a reliable subscription feed right now.
Having to juggle multiple accounts to keep track of subscription feeds instead of one unified feed is a pretty big con. Not so much on the commenting end since that I do understand the reasons for.
it looks like there is no reddit alternative to a reliable subscription feed right now.
Lemmy was not built for scale, and the everything from large-community moderation to federation message copying is going through problem identification and optimization.
The Beehaw.org website is regularly malfunctions for me, showing the Lemmy 0.17.x problem of getting the wrong voting data on postings. Hopefully the forthcoming 0.18 removal of websockets will eliminate a lot of that.
Lemmy, as it stands today, really isn’t ready for anything near like the activity of from page /r/all community on Reddit.
I don’t mean so much in activity. Just the subscription to communities part.
Like knowing I could subscribe to like gamedeals and pcgaming and knowing that I can rely on my feed to contain posts from those communities as opposed one of them defeding from each so now having to subscribe to separate instances of pcgaming and gamedeals to see activity from those communities in my subscription feed. So now having two subscription feeds as opposed to one unified one to keep track of.
I wish we could federate our own user accounts on unrelated instances with each other, separate from the instance federation? So beehaw and lemmy.world can be unfederated, but if I have an account on beehaw and another account on lemmy.world, then I can connect those two accounts so that I can see the posts from both accounts in each one? Is something like this possible?
That way individual users wouldn’t be so inconvenienced, but beehaw would still be isolated from lemmy.world’s unrestricted signups/different culture in the same way.
I think you might just not be interested in federated services. The whole point is that it’s a network of independent services, not a single unified platform. For some people that works well and for others it doesn’t. The fediverse solution would be to create a new account on an instance that federates with both instances, but you’re probably going to end up playing whack-a-mole until things settle down and I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to do that.
I can use feeder to get an rss feed of different websites. Even though they aren’t run by the same people or companies.
That’s something I want for lemmy where I can set up something like
lemmy/c/PatientGamers@sh.itjust.works+technology@beehaw.org+Futurama @lemmy.world+Android@lemmy.world+RetroGaming@lemmy.world+PC Gaming@lemmy.ca+Movies and TV Shows@lemmy.film/.rss
You should be able to do that. Each community should have an rss feed button. It should give you a feed of all the new posts, but I don’t think it’ll help with comments.
The alternative it looks like for now is to subscribe to an instance thats both not blocked by beehaw and doesnt block lemmy.world
To me the point of the fediverse is that these things can happen and if you don’t like them you can just go to another instance.
I understand the reasons behind blocking off those communities. And I’m fine with it since the points made were good.
If this were another platform I’d have no choice and they wouldn’t need to make good arguments.
I’ve been seeing a lot of low-effort content lately, and I suspect it’s coming from users who want their Reddit alternative, and they want it now. So, they see that Beehaw has a large community, and decide it’s a perfect place to start content-barfing.
I think the admins have been clear that they’re not trying to create a replacement for Reddit here, though. Everything under the sun does not have to be re-posted, just content that you actually want to discuss with this community specifically. When I see five posts created by one user in under a minute, I can’t help but think that the intent there is not to spark discussion. And, of course, the volume is problematic for the mods when they don’t have the tools they need to manage it.
I agree. Beehaw has a different goal (which is thoroughly explained in the stickied FAQ post), and it is not to be a Reddit replacement. I’m actually a fan of the environment and goal here - I’ve actually found myself responding to posts from a week or two ago because I actually wanted to contribute, whereas I wouldn’t bother on a Reddit post more than a couple of hours old because it would just get drowned out by a flood of low-effort content.
Yes!! I’ve also found myself actually reading articles that are posted rather than just skimming headlines because people actually seem to want to engage beyond the same few points that were repeatedly made on Reddit
Exactly - the best way I can think to describe it is that I no longer feel like I’m going to be locked out of discussion because I took too long to actually read what the conversation was about. For me personally, that turned into me becoming a terminal lurker, but others wind up skimming headlines or pieces of longer comments and trying to rush to respond. In the latter case, that wound up translating into shallower, briefer discussion points in an effort to keep up and try to be seen. Overall, it seems like Beehaw is steering more towards longer-form, slower discussions (as demonstrated by the long posts written by the various admins and mods). I won’t say this is an objectively good or bad thing, it’s a matter of personal preference, but it’s definitely more my speed since I try to be deliberate with what I post and tend to take a while to digest what I’m reading and try to form a more substantial response. I do definitely see why that wouldn’t be what people might be looking for though - it’s kind of the difference between quick-witted banter or more meandering navel-gazing (for lack of better descriptions).
Yes!!! I love the longer form more thought out posts, but you perfectly captured the pros of each type! Both can be good for sure
I was seeing that, too. And it was turning me off. I’ve definitely been spending more time on more discussion-based platforms, instead of on Beehaw. I’m tired of reddit’s constant one-like jokes and drive-by memeing that’s so common, even in more discussion-based subs.
There’s certainly a time and place for having some fun – and I’ve done my fair share of memeing on reddit – but it doesn’t have to be everywhere. It is disappointing since it’s a loss of easily accessible content, but I’m sure we’ll be able to find that elsewhere. Even if it means going to those instances on a separate account.
I think I’m starting to observe that I define lurking and contributing differently than a lot of redditfugees. To me lurking is browsing, reading, and consuming without ever commenting or submitting. That was how we used the term back in 2010, 2011 anyway. And it seems like the call to action to contribute is interpreted by many to just dump all the thoughts, memes, shitposts, and whatever else into the threadiverse regardless of quality.
I want to make it abundantly clear, if that’s what people want, that’s great, I’m glad they can find that (196 on blahaj seems particularly hot for that) but it’s not what I want. I’ve immediately noticed myself far more engaged with beehaw than I’ve been with reddit in a long time and I attribute that to the thoughtful nature of the community that’s been cultivated by the administrators. I can understand that people who were on beehaw and were subscribed to communities on these other instances are frustrated and disappointed. I’m one of those people. But I’d rather create an alt on another instance to interact with those communities than have administrators not build the communities they want.
And to anyone saying that beehaw is engaging in censorship, let me ask you this. Would you like it if anyone and everyone could enter your backyard and say anything they want to you? These online communities are an expression of our human right to associate. All beehaw is going is saying there’s a particular vibe they want in their backyard and that to walk through the gate you have to abide by certain rules. That’s not censorship. That’s community building
A few years back, there was a short-lived site that attempted to be a better site like Reddit. Unfortunately, they started up around the time that The_Dipsht and alt-reich subreddits were starting to get quarantined. Amusingly, many of them tried to move to Voat, who by then had become so toxic that they were called poseurs and told to go away.
So they showed up at the door of the new site - who handled them very gracefully. There were suddenly a pile of alt-reich white supremacy communities on the site. The admins basically told them and their creators, “Gee, thanks for stopping by. We’re so glad you thought of us. Here’s your hat. Sorry you can’t stay longer. Bye now, have a nice day!” and deleted all the communities, the people who created them, and those who had subscribed. And that was that.
Unfortunately, people weren’t yet fed up enough with Reddit and the new site didn’t get enough people to stick around. It was a lovely little place, not unlike what Beehaw is trying to do.
In the olden days I was part of several Usenet communities that got destroyed by trolls and spam, so I completely understand - and support - this action.
Dang this really sucks :/ i understand why it’s important from a modding perspective. I guess I’ll need to open an account elsewhere and get a client with multi account support
This is going to be a learning process I think for a lot of people. Not just on federation, but on community building as well. You all seem to be trying to build something here, and I am willing to be patient and participate while it grows. If we get down the road and it just isn’t working, I have faith that there will be open discussion on how to make this community grow while maintaining its ethos and we’ll be here to figure out what is best for each of us individually.
Good on you for taking decisive action at these early stages while we figure out what we want, where we want to go, and how we want to get there on this relatively new platform.
we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space
Fully agreed. I’d personally rather have less overall content, if it means that the sense of community remains strong.
Yeah I’m in agreement with this. I’ve found the community here pretty engaged, and the content keeps coming. I think the hard part is recognizing that bigger isn’t always better, especially when you lack the tools to customize it. Between this and artifact, I’m pretty content with my discussion/news outlets.
Same here. Less content is just fine with me if it means better community interactions, because the community has been my favorite thing about being here so far, as new as I am.
I am really new here but if it adds to anything I fully agree with any direction that will or reasonably should, lead to everyone here having a better space.
Also want to add that I do appreciate the effort that the mods/admins are putting into it.
As a minor aside I’m working on another philosophy post about moderating specifically - what I’ve observed over the years, what I think works well in our vision, what extra work is needed in safe spaces and to prevent evaporative cooling, what I’m almost certain we need to do, and where my blind spots are.
Wallet take all these posts and turn them into a zine or pdf or somethin I’d read it
If someone wants to interview me for a podcast I’m more than happy to blabber for some amount of time. My brain is full of plenty of useless ideas 😄
Not a podcast, but I’m an author and editor with a small audience that may well be interested in a text interview, would you be interested in that?
Sure yeah
Would be great to hear you on the Techdirt podcast. I don’t have any in or anything to make that happen, just think it would be cool.
@mmasnick any interest in getting one of the beehaw.org admins on the podcast or something?
From @Gaywallet
That’s a really well considered post, and I’m happy to see someone at the helm with such a good grasp of what it takes to manage a community. Saved and looking forward to reading more.
That was a really good read and it made a lot of things click for me regarding social media and my relationship with it. Thank you!
Thanks for the Evaporative Cooling link, that was a great read!
The trick is that human behavior, and especially human language, are very… squishy.
Very apt; the whole post managed to put into words things that I was vaguely aware of, but would never be able to connect so succinctly.
You guys are doing a fantastic job, and it’s really great to see the level of thought you put into your decisions, as well as comments like this one where we can see some of the thoughts and philosophy behind them.
I hope the Exodus doesn’t burn you out; I’m rooting for this community to survive and prosper. Thank you for all the hard work.
@Gaywallet Have you moderated communities before Beehaw? You seem like you have a lot of (bad) experiences with it but are still passionate about it, any specific place it comes from? I’m just being curious, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to
Yes I’ve moderated plenty of reddit subs, including defaults. I moderate twitch streams for a few big name artists. I moderate discords and facebook groups of various sizes. In real life I’ve moderated plenty of talks, served on leadership or mediated in various forms of activism, professional groups, and social ones. I wouldn’t say my experiences are bad, they’ve all been learning experiences. Each one has taught me something different about what is and is not effective.
Thank you, that was really interesting! I’ve never heard of evaporative cooling before.
Good on ya. I’ve already blocked several communities from those instances simply due to the sheer volume of low effort content.
The 196 community on shit just works was literally like half of the posts on the all filter yesterday before I blocked it.
Also blocking communities RULES. What a great feature! Like regardless of why, there are tons of things on the internet that I just have no interest in whatsoever! It’s cool to be able to very easily filter that stuff out.
I know exactly how you feel — I installed an extension in Chrome the other day for the sole purpose of blocking Quora from Google Search results. Fantastic 👍
Is there one of those for pinterest?
Some possibilities here. There’s a Chrome extension mentioned; adding a string to UBlock looks the most promising to me, since I use FF.
Honestly my favorite part is that I can block risky communities very easily from the accounts I use at work. That allows me to surf the “all” page without worrying about NSFW subs or posts with NSFW language/text as the title. It maximizes how productively I can be unproductive while working. It’s terrific.
Believe it or not, for some of us, 196 was the reason we came to lemmy in the first place. I can do without reddit, but I can’t do without a non-hateful meme stream.
I mean, I absolutely get that and wasn’t trying to shit on it. I was using it as an example for why blocking communities is cool. I like the idea of 196, I dig it, some even made me laugh out loud, and 196 explained to me what a tankie is because I was OOTL. The problem was that it got so saturated so quickly that it was making it hard to find non-meme content. So with two clicks - problem solved. The best part is it’s (almost) just as easy to reverse it! Just search the community, click, unblock. It’s a seriously convenient feature.
Enjoy your memes my friend!
The 196 community on shit just works was literally like half of the posts on the all filter yesterday before I blocked it.
tbh I’m not even sure what that community was for
It’s a meme community, the main rule is that when you visit you must post a meme. So, the more people visit the more posts it gets. No idea why the name though, likely an in-joke.
Because it was the successor to r/195, a meme subreddit started by some friends who lived in apartment 195 somewhere. Then it took off, privated itself a few years later, and 196 popped up to replace it and somehow became wonderfully infested with leftists and LGBT.
I strongly disagree with this decision – as lemmy progresses and stabilizes, open registrations will become normal and just blocking open instances will not be a viable solution.
I can’t say if this is just a need for better mod tooling or a fundamental problem with federation, but it’s certainly concerning.
Just a heads up so you can try to plan ahead: on Reddit one of the tactics used by those with hateful agendas was to shut down progressive threads by purposely creating drama in that thread to overwhelm the moderators so that they had to lock the thread thus stopping all discussion. Sometimes they did this by being awful and dragging in well meaning users into fights, other times I they’d drop a few “I’m just asking questions” comments focussing on hot-button ideas that they knew would rile up arguments. It was very deliberate tactic and one that I don’t think moderators ever figured out how to deal with effectively, because short of babysitting the thread with their full attention from start to finish there was no way to prevent entire threads from devolving into attacks and arguments.
The crazy thing was how effectively one or two people with hateful agendas could derail an entire comment section of well meaning people and, by getting the thread locked, shut down the discussion and spread of progressive ideas.
I bring this up because Beehaw is perhaps uniquely vulnerable to this sort of ‘attack’, and you should expect to see it in the future. By joining other federated instances and using these tactics to stir up drama in Beehaw threads they can, by forcing your hand to defederalize, restrict the access of those other communities to the progressive ideals and ideas posted on Beehaw. The end result is isolating progressive ideas inside our walled garden, while users of the rest of the Lemmy instances start to only see more right-wing extremist views, normalizing them to otherwise everyday people.
I don’t have a solution to this. But it’s something to be aware of in discussions with the moderators of other instances, that a handful of people with this exact agenda can make their community look bad in order to restrict their users’ access to progressive ideas.
This is a pivotal moment in the Lemmyverse, and I’m not sure if this will be better overall or not.
It might be a fundamental flaw of federated servers, or just something that should be expected and welcomed.
I guess time will tell.
A similar transition took place with mastodon.social and mstdn.social when they both grew prohibitively large; however, in that case, Mastodon now offers much better tooling for moderating and managing federation. Until Lemmy’s software similarly matures, this is the best solution that Beehaw can put up.
We expect we’ll be able to refederate as soon as we get an adequate level of granularity in moderation tools to prevent bad actors like this. If you’re a developer looking for a good target for what is needed, it’s precisely this.
I made a post mentioning this earlier, hopefully at least a few peeps will see it and join in. I don’t have the needed skills or I’d take a stab at it myself.
Mastodon has a better solution for this in my opinion - it’s not completely black or white like lemmy’s system. See : https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/#limit-server
Hopefully this will be implemented soon on Lemmy, so people can find the content they want even if the instance is limited.
Mastodon really has top tier moderation and federation controls. Unfortunately Lemmy was very niche before the recent surge in users, so the project never got the attention it needed to get these tools ready for the current surge in activity.
I insist, this shitstorm should have happened a year or two from now instead of these days! Bad timing! :P
This concept doesn’t seem like it maps cleanly onto Lemmy’s community grouping.
Absolutely - mastodon had similar moments in the big twitter waves where some pretty large instances defederated from some other large ones (some of them even mastodon.social) over moderation policy. Defederation like this is also a means of moderating the fediverse as a whole - if the admins of an instance are unwilling to moderate their users, other instances can encourage action like this.
I think this is an advantage of the system. On something like reddit, a subreddit has to make use of heavy automation tools or a lot of manpower to create a culture, ultimately any sub on reddit is subject to the overall reddit culture, it can be hard to grow something of your own.
Federation gives power to communities to separate themselves to be more selective. If someone wants something more similar to reddit, those mass-connected instances will always exist. It gives choice to communities in how they want to grow and present themselves.
I think ultimately the flaws are in the tools that are available currently.
It’s just growing pains, literal thousands of people joining small free services managed by volunteers in their spare time, not thousands of employees of a megacorp working on it 24/7, it’s EXPECTED that things like this happen. The fact that they have all this transparency and thoughtfulness on it is GOOD.
I feel like calling this a pivotal moment is just drama-bait, but i hope this can be a lesson for people that the whole god damn point of federation is that people DON’T all gather on 4 monolithic instances.
As a user of a smaller instance i just laugh at all the drama at this point, i barely even notice anything outside of these posts, everything keeps on trucking without issue as everyone else screams their heads off.
Almost like you benefit from using the technology how it was intended, crazy.
Not a beehaw user directly, but I use many beehaw communities.
I appreciate the forwardness and transparency in this matter. As you’ve outlined, both in this post and in subsequent comments, this seems to be, rather than a full defederation, a conditional one. I’m totally for that, and I think the ability to do so is one of the key concepts that makes Federation such a useful and powerful tool. Those instances who cannot or do not moderate content that your instance doesn’t believe in can simply be removed from the equation.
I hope to see more of this accountability being held between instances in the future. At the end of the day, our communities are fragmented by nature, and there are times we should remove separate communities explicitly. A good example I can think of is on Mastodon all the instances with CSAM or nazis.
The Fediverse gives us a greater ability to fine-tune our communities and curate the experience members thereof get to have, as well as what content they can be exposed to. I’m glad to see people taking strong action in favour of their community, and so long as it comes from this perspective, with genuine communication with the community, everything will work out.
/rant
So, not to be cold to this decision (because I totally understand that this didn’t come lightly and don’t want to “well ackshually” the mod team) but given I’m new to the fediverse as a concept, what does this mean for me as an end-user? Can I no longer engage with those communities at all? Or rather, what does defederating mean overall?
This does much more harm than good IMO - splintering the community at such a sensitive time of growth is a bad idea.
Hopefully there’ll be the ability to block images in comments and posts, and better tools for blocking / detecting spammers, and cross-instance bans, auto-moderating hyperlinks, etc. soon.
But the demand for unilateral access to other communities’ content is disturbing. The Lemmy federation works because of reciprocity.
Definitely won’t be recommending beehaw for new users now.
Thanks team - this is a big decision to make and I’m sure it’s a challenging one, but I think it’s the right one - both for beehaw and its users and the wider fed/lemmyverse as a whole. I’m really appreciating beehaw’s values and how we’re sticking to them, here.
Completely agree with this decision, and it actually comes as a bit of a relief; I saw a statistically significant number of lemmy.world users who admitted to being denied from Beehaw because they didn’t want to “write an essay” or aggressively disagreed with the disabled downvotes (something that I’ve grown to appreciate).
I’m expect that the large influx of disruptive users is from the reddit migration, and I’m hopeful that the majority of the users will either adapt to the culture we’re trying to build here, or find their own niches in other communities. As you noted in your post, and in my own experience moderating real life groups, allowing a disruptive influence in a safe space can have serious negative effects on group cohesion that can persist for a long time, if it doesn’t alter the culture outright.
I agree with the general consensus in this thread that, though regrettable, I appreciate what you are trying to do with this. It is fairly straightforward to create an account on another instance to see other content if we want to, and I appreciate Beehaw being its own, special thing.
